I'm not expecting a serious reply, but I'll give it a try anyway. I've bben playing the beta version of RF Online, and after 2 hours of mindless wondering and killing of various creatures, the thought occured to me, "what exactly is the point of an online game?". I wonder if any of you could shead some light on this for me.
Most MMOG's like RF Online have no real point. They're just on long grind, trying to level up or gathering 100's of rare items for just a silly looking head gear. You should try out Guild Wars, I believe they offer a free trail and soo, they'll be beta testing they're next expansion/chapter in the game caled Factions. I suggest this b/c I have played GW for over 4 months now and have experienced no kind of grind what-so-ever! It's more objective or mission based than anything else and the PvP is good as well. Combat is intense since everyone is only allowed to use 8 skills at a time (kinda makes it like a chess game meets PvP game IMO). Let me know if you're interested and I can try to help you out getting through the first parts of the game.
Ostensibly MMORPGs are about playing a role and making friends/enemies online. The reality is it's usually a level/skill grind dressed up with lore few care about or bother reading. A few like Ultima Online or EVE give players more freedom that can result in interesting dynamics. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/25/5 The big trend in the last few years has been a move towards more individual play with more and more instanced content, doing away with the whole "massively multiplayer" aspect that supposedly defines the genre. To find the kind of social interaction promised by MMORPGs you have to turn to text-based MUDs.
Then there's the non-RPG MMOs like World War 2 Online. It's a 1/2 scale recreation of the western front in a combination of FPS and vehicle simulations. Axis and Allies fight until one side captures all the terrain(which may take several weeks or months), then the map resets and the game starts over. The other side of that coin would be Planetside, another MMOFPS, but designed to remain in a perpetual stalemate. Players can take enemy territory, but keeping it is made difficult enough to not allow the fronts to shift permanently.
Outside of the games centered around combat are ones like A Tale in the Desert where the emphasis is on building things and competitive creative expression. Second Life takes it to an extreme, where there is no "game" but what objects the players build and how they program their creations to interact with the world.
drama. it's all about the drama.
Wasting time. Living a replacement life with success if you can't take real life. Guess that's the only point of mmorpgs.
If you've got IRL friends that play too, it's kinda like a more engaging chatroom in which you can do stuff. You can amuse yourselves and such. Laugh at someone dying due to lag, and the like.
>>3
Do you play ATITD? I played at little in the first telling but really didn't get into it. I ended up playing the first few months of the second telling though and enjoyed maybe the first month and a half then I couldn't bear it anymore. I played for about another month just because of the relationships and friends until people started dropping like flies.
On topic though
I think the point of MMORPGs is to make money for the company. I know, such a far out idea. If they can get away with buggy games, poor content, long pointless grinds and ultra rare drops.. they will. WoW is a good example of this, the game is really good until you get around level 40. By then they figure you are invested enough in your character, relationships, friends, whatever that they just stop caring about making the game fun. WoW isn't the only one that exibts this problem, or maybe it is not intentional.. just the fact that when you get to the end game you are tried of doing the same old same old. I had stopped playing EQ at one point until college. Someone else in my dorm played on the same server I had played on and his guild was often short on a cleric or something. He asked me to play one for them on raids a couple of times, and then I started playing multiple characters and had the top characters in the guild basically. Even then, while playing multiple characters at once and the new content was enjoyable for a while the thrill eventually had gone away. Oh well, I got booze money out of it.
What about games like Guild Wars, without the grind of beating monsters to level up?
I don't think Guild Wars is really a MMO, in the same vein that Diablo 2 was not. The time of MMOs really seems to have come to an end with developers realizing how much easier it is to do instancing.
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no point at all just a bunch of people with no talent for real games
>>11
Could you elaborate for those who never played Diablo 2?
>>15 well in Diablo 2 you have a character (I'm going to assume closed realm) that you can play with anyone with, but only 8 people in a game at once. Switch game for instance and up the limit and you basically have Diablo 2 with more people. To truely qualify as an MMO I think you need to actually have a massive amount of people that can all interact at once.